News

TU Delft, the Netherlands and Seaborg Technologies, Denmark, started a one year project on the investigation of fuel molten salt chemistry for the development of an innovative molten salt nuclear reactor design. The researchers at TU Delft are Dr Anna Smith (Associate Professor) and Lukasz Ruszczynski (Postdoc). Seaborg Technologies’ vision is to deliver clean, cost-competitive, and safe energy with their promising Compact Molten Salt Reactor (CMSR) concept.

Current coolant gases from air conditioners and fridges either contribute a significant amount to global warming, or otherwise they are dangerous to use. Bowei Huang and Michael Maschek from the Delft company Magneto are working on a safe and environmental friendly alternative for cooling: a unique solid material for heat pumps.

Anna Smith, Martin Rohde en Danny Lathouwers van het TU Delft Reactor Instituut nemen deel aan het MIMOSA-project dat een multi-recyclingstrategie zal ontwikkelen voor verbruikte splijtstoffen van lichtwaterreactoren op basis van gesmolten-zouttechnologieën.

Researchers from TU Delft have found a new method to efficiently make nano carriers loaded with radioactive salts for both medical imaging and treatment. Because the assembly of these nano carriers is incredibly simple, the innovation is very suitable for clinical research and treatments of cancer patients.

More and more greenhouses are being built worldwide due to their reliable environmental conditions; inside however, the amount of sunlight that plants can use for growth is limited. Physicist Sadiq van Overbeek from PHYSEE Technologies, a spin-off of the Radiation Science & Technology department of TU Delft at TU Delft Reactor Institute & Radiation Science and Technology, found a solution to this bottleneck: a special coating on the greenhouse that converts incoming light towards the part of the spectrum that plants use for photosynthesis. Van Overbeek: “First results show up to 10% more crops with this PAR+ coating.”

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded a Veni grant to researcher Robin de Kruijff of the Reactor Institute Delft (RID) for her research on a new type of radionuclide generator which, among other things, can obviate the global bottleneck in cancer research. The new generator will, moreover, be the first recyclable one of its kind. “I hope that my new type of generator will ultimately make diagnostic treatments much more accessible and less dependent on a handful of reactors”, says De Kruijff.

Recently an important project on fuels for future generation of reactors has been concluded. The aim of the INSPYRE project: investigation of fast reactor Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel to support the development and qualification of the fuels for the future generation of reactors.